Pedro Tolipan: Driving innovation from within

Pauline Bertry 0:13

Hi Pedro, welcome to the Den. How are you today?

Pedro Tolipan 0:16

I'm great. Yeah, very good actually. Nice sunny day here. Summer finally kind of coming. So really good.

Pauline Bertry 0:24

Yeah, so good to see you again. It's been ages. So where are you now?

Pedro Tolipan 0:28

I am in Baku in Azerbaijan.

Pauline Bertry 0:31

Nice, amazing. I mean, I know it feels weird to ask because we know each other forever, but I wanted to start this conversation by asking you to tell me and everyone who is listening to us a little bit about you, about your story, like the past and the present and what's next.

Pedro Tolipan 0:52

For sure. So I'm a seasonal design leader with 20 plus years of experience. And I'd say kind of a mix between agency and client side and in-house. I started my career in London in a boutique kind of graphic design agency as I studied graphic design at university. And soon we moved into designing digital experiences. worked for Razorfish for a number of years, which is a name that you might recognize. Now Sapient, part of Sapient. I worked for another kind of tech consultancy in London, an independent one, for a number of years before I tried to go as an in-house designer. I worked for the BBC, I worked for Vodafone, I worked for Barclays. And then one day I got a call from a McKinsey recruiter. asking if I wanted to come for an interview. And funny enough, and I tell this anecdote a lot, because my initial answer on the phone was that, you got the wrong person. I'm a designer. And then the person explained, no, no, no, we know you're a designer. We are building McKinsey Digital Lab, which is slightly different than the traditional consultancy. And we're looking exactly for people like yourself to join us. And then I said, well, OK. I was actually, at that time, and we'll come to this later, I'm preferring to work as an in-house designer than agency. But I thought, one of the most prestigious consultancies in the world, so I got to give it a go. And after seven interviews, I got the job and ended up staying for 10 years. Before I got the calling to join Here Where I Am in Baku, I was a... actually looking for another opportunity in a different country. And I was interviewing in Dubai when this kind of surfaces and you know the history because you were part of the setup. And

Pauline Bertry 2:57

Yes.

Pedro Tolipan 2:58

I was positively impressed by the country. I knew nothing about it, to be 100 % honest, apart from the Formula One event. And here I found a bit of a mix of Super modern architecture with kind of the old traditional styles of really a very old country, which has been part of different empires, so it has a lot of different cultural influences. And the fact that you can walk around on the streets and go to cafes and bars and restaurants, I thought this was kind of unexpected and fantastic. And after meeting the team, thought, okay, that sounds like a good match. And here I am. And not without challenges, obviously, as you would imagine, kind of going from London, living in Madrid for a while, and then coming all the way to the, we say where the wind makes a turn. Baku means the city of wind, right?

Pauline Bertry 4:00

Yes.

Pedro Tolipan 4:00

And very different culture, very different. dynamics and a lot of positives and challenges, but overall it's been a great experience so far for the last year and a half.

Pauline Bertry 4:13

And so tell me and everyone else a little bit about Futurelab. What are you guys cooking?

Pedro Tolipan 4:22

Yeah, so our mandate is to drive a people-centric future for the country. So very ambitious. We are a small innovation engine within a large financial holding. So our holding owns kind two of the largest banks in the country, two insurance companies, a big e-commerce marketplace. but also they go outside financial services into the supermarket, one of the largest supermarket chains. We own a huge real estate company, construction, entertainment, hotel. We manage some chain of hotels. So it's a really large organization with very different type of mindset and experience across industry. So it's a tough job. We are starting kind of working with all the... kind of the different companies really driving this kind of human-centric mindset across our businesses. But the ambitious is to also go outside our business and really have a kind of a loss and impact for the country. We have already started to put our, know, our toes into the deeper water of the country outside our companies. But it's really kind of a long-term vision. And we kind of just... kind of starting on this journey.

Pauline Bertry 5:46

I'm super curious to go into one topic with you, because as you said, you have a lot of experience in an agency, now you are in an internal innovation studio, which also functions a little bit like a professional service or expertise hub. What are the differences in terms of Like how you think about a team, the kind of capabilities you need, how you grow the culture, how you build the culture, how you live with the culture that is maybe different in the group. So what are the like patterns that you see are similar between external agency and internal innovation unit and what is completely different?

Pedro Tolipan 6:32

Very good, very good question. So let me go back to what I was saying at the beginning. I used to say that, because people used to ask me, what's the difference between working as a creative agency and as an in-house professional? And I used to say that working for an agency is like running lots of sprints, and working in-house is like running a marathon. So you're there for the long run, we're agencies who are involved in different parts of a problem. they bring you in to solve it, but then you're out. You rarely see the end to end of whatever you're working with. And as an in-house, you're there for the long run. So it's slower, but it's more about stamina and seeing the bigger picture. And fun enough, because here it is a bit of an agency. We are a bit of an agency working with the group, but we're also part of the group. So I'd say it's both. running sprints and a marathon at the same time. And if I do a bit of a reflection on this year and half that I've been here, I think there are challenges on the personal level as a leader and how I lead the team, but also there is kind of the challenges as you mentioned, as a small company trying to muscle up with some bigger companies in terms of how do you shift the mindset, how do you deliver impact. into these businesses. And from a personal perspective, obviously coming from outside and I think one of the key things here is this whole discipline of design, research, of product management, it's quite new. So we don't find people with 10, 15 years experience in this field here. So the team is very young. They are very talented. but they're very inexperienced. So we have a lot of kind of raw talent and you need to go and look in the right places. And I interviewed a lot of people that are really trying to find not necessarily the most skillful people, but the people with the kind of prone to the right mindset. They're curious, they wanna learn. And this is the type of people, type of the culture that we're building here at FutureLab. Now I have... often ask me this question is how do you motivate Gen Z people, right?

Pauline Bertry 8:57

I didn't ask it yet but I was going to, so...

Pedro Tolipan 9:00

And this is a challenge that I'm kind of grappling with all the time because it's different, right? It's different. They're motivated by different things. And as a leader, and I think also, obviously they do look up to me, especially coming from outside and having this experience in London and Spain. And I can point out the individuals, are super. curious about my experience and they want to learn, they want to connect and they ask me questions to the people who are a little bit more skeptical and think that, you know, this guy come from outside and, you know, what is he doing here? I mean, there's a bit of that as well, unfortunately. But the challenge is how do I strike the right balance of, you know, pushing people the right way. you know, observing kind of the cultural nuances of the country, understanding that they come and they have a different perspective professionally, although they are more and more exposed to Western things and to, and also Eastern things and Russia. But so they're eager to do things, but they haven't really done it yet. So they look at it to me

Pauline Bertry 10:19

Mm.

Pedro Tolipan 10:19

so how How do we do it? How do we get moving? How do we kind of make this happen? And a great part of the mandate of FutureLab, so one is kind of working on projects, so delivering products in the market and doing lots of discoveries, research, really bringing kind of a human perspective into problems, which a lot of our companies don't. But the other thing is in parallel, how do you build capabilities? So we are bringing through our network Also, our CEO of Futurelab has an extensive experience, international experience and a great network, especially in the US. So we are bringing these thought leaders in different topics into the country to do trainings, we do partnerships like we did with CIID. We just did a program with Stanford that we brought into the country. So this is really moving the needle in terms of building the capabilities. But the key thing is... How do you drive this customer-centric mindset? So we work with one of the largest corporate banks in the country, and they're very successful, but they've been doing things in a certain way for a while. And we come in saying, you're missing the big side of the picture here. If you want to grow your market share in specific segments, if you want to look into the future and how Technology is driving some of the innovations that we see now everywhere. So you need to be prepared, not just from a technical perspective, but from a human-centric perspective. And I keep saying, and I guess this conversation will go into AI at some point, but for me, AI is a 10 % a technology problem and 90 % a human problem to solve. So how do we prepare our colleagues, our companies, our leaders? be ready for these kind of technology advancements that we are seeing and really bringing the human aspect of it along the way to understand what does drive our population to do things in a certain way, how do you make a better country for them, and how do we better serve our customers, obviously, in the end.

Pauline Bertry 12:36

And I'm super curious to follow up on the capability building topic that you were mentioning, because from all the exchanges we've had before the podcast and from the context I know, I know that... the expectations from the products and the services that you are building, are distinctive, right? So there are lot of kind of a lot of expectations put on the delivery and on the kind of quality of the service that is going on the market from the lab. And you also mentioned that the team is eager to learn, but they might not always have all of the necessary skills to get there. So how are you thinking about and how you are approaching building those capabilities at the speed that is required to deliver the products that you guys deliver? Because I mean, I know that what you are delivering is distinctive. So how do you make this happen?

Pedro Tolipan 13:47

Yeah. So I think if you look at the events and the trainings that we bring into our companies, I think we've been super successful on that front because we really managed to make a difference in terms of the, again, the international thought leaders we brought into the company, either to run training programs or to come and speak at events. So this has been fantastic. On the product delivery side has been more of a challenge for us. And I tell you why. So when we're doing kind of discoveries and normally run two or three months, deep generative research initiatives in the country, I think this has been very successful because we are bringing human insights into our business that they didn't have before. And mainly because they didn't have experience in doing research. Most of the research they've done before is either through surveys or call center, calling people and asking how things are going. But they've never really sent a team to deep down into one of the rural parts of the country to interview people and to observe how they live their lives. And this is what FutureLab is doing. But so the insights we bring, I think they're reaching the right people, the right leaders in our organizations, but we're not controlling what happens next. And this is the biggest challenge for us. So it's like influence without ownership, I would say. So

Pauline Bertry 15:19

Hmm.

Pedro Tolipan 15:21

when we come to then, we excite people about the possibility of doing this and say, OK, let's do it. And when we come to then work on building. products and software and putting them in the market, we heavily rely on working with our partner companies. And we do this by bringing them their developers, then we work with their designers. We have a small team that we bring into the mix, but then we're heavily depending on them. And this is when the whole kind of engine starts to slow down dramatically. So we managed to really pay space, pay space, pay space, research and insight. and we bring all this together, and it's amazing kind of what if we can do this and then they get excited and okay let's do it and then the whole thing just slows down and we start having you know culture clashes they do it this way we want to do it differently and this is the bit that I'm really kind of trying to work out now. How do we move the needle in terms of slowly and I think Obviously, if you want to kind of influence or even change the culture of an organization, that's not something we can do from outside, even as an agency. So we really need to bring them into this journey and see that this is a long-term game, that they need to rethink how they incentivize their salespeople. They need to rethink how they train their call center. They need to rethink kind of what metrics that they put for the teams to achieve that are more. based on, also based on customer-centric metrics, not just financial metrics. So, and across this journey, we get reluctant, reluctancy from them along the way. And even if you manage to bring the CEOs into this and agree with us, the mandate to trickle down the organization is slow to filter down. And we feel frustrated because You know, at the beginning we said, in six months we're going to put this product into the market and we fail, we can't do it. So this is how we're trying to rethink how do we kind of, what's the word, how do we manage to really bring the whole organization into this journey along with us? It's not an easy task, to be honest.

Pauline Bertry 17:49

So that's the marathon part, right?

Pedro Tolipan 17:53

That is the marathon part. Absolutely, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pauline Bertry 17:55

Hehehe.

Pedro Tolipan 17:56

The discoveries are the sprints, which we are,

Pauline Bertry 17:58

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 17:59

you know, fast, efficient, we own it, we drive it. And then when we start really making this a partnership, then it's the marathon. And I mean, I think we slowly get in there. For me, even, you know, small little shifts in the way they do things, it's a win. But to drive a people-centric future, let the country aside for a second, for our businesses, it's not like a six months, a year. It's a long-term thing that's going to take a while to shift.

Pauline Bertry 18:32

It's a long game. I mean, it feels like the team is also kind of working into two directions, right? One element is like building the culture of the future lab itself. And then at the same time, kind of transferring and sharing the insights and the learnings that you've gathered internally with the entire organization. So I'm also wondering, because if I'm not mistaken, when you joined, the team was still quite small, right? So it was maybe 10 people or something. I think last time we spoke, you told me that you were 25 now. So it's like a huge growth. over the last year, how are you kind of, how are you thinking about building the culture and the capabilities internally and kind of keeping up with this speed of growth?

Pedro Tolipan 19:32

Yeah, as you know, it took us a while to get our engines kind of oiled up. So there was a bit, some mis-hiring, some tough conversations we had to have with the team. But I think we are 30 people now.

Pauline Bertry 19:49

Wow!

Pedro Tolipan 19:50

And I have a really, really good feeling that we have an amazing team now that is delivering, that is empowered, is eager to continuously learn. But as I said, they might not have all the skill sets that you'd expect from an agency trying to drive innovation across large organizations, but they are talented. have, you know, they're... Well, we hired some, I think we've hired probably the best talents across our groups. And again, not because they already have the skillset, but because they have the right mindset. And probably, I mean, at the beginning for probably for the first six months to a year, I really struggled to, I think I've touched on this a little bit earlier. how to engage with the team. Obviously the gap in experience, even the gap in age is huge, right? And you know, the cultural differences and all that. So sometimes I felt like they don't understand me, but they don't speak up. Well, they don't tell me they didn't understand. So there was a lot of, and probably now after, you know, a few kind of trying and failing and... with one of the, one of the two positions that we, we hired. One is I've hired someone kind of to lead, to manage the team day to day. So this is not about adding kind of layers of hierarchy in the team, but it's someone that can speak their language. They understand their culture and someone super experienced as well, but can really kind of move the team into action in the right way, which I thought I was slightly failing because of this kind of. cultural gap, age gap, experience gap, everything that I mentioned. And I'm still like super attached to the team and connected to them. My relationship with them improved significantly since we hired this person. And I feel like we are lot more streamlined in terms of how do we kind of drive our projects. a little bit more free now to do a lot of more of the kind of senior engagements that I was doing at the same time. So managing up, managing down, building relationships was a bit tough for me in the beginning. And now we've managed to create an operating model that kind of works and the team's happy, I'm happy. And we can see that in the kind of in the results that we've been having. We also hired an operations person. who is dealing with all of our capability building initiatives, our events, our training programs, which I was also doing a lot of that before. So I think the engine feels like the screws are tight, the engine is oiled up. Now it's just really getting this kind of mileage under our belts and just kind of having fun together, delivering things and failing and learning and doing better as we go along.

Pauline Bertry 22:49

I love it. And I mean, we are talking a lot about capability building and we started touching on AI. So there is absolutely no way I was not going to ask you about this. And I mean, I don't even know from where to start. So let me put a very like open question. Like, what's the place that AI now has in your like internal working environment and also in products or the services you deliver and like how do you like how do even think about it in in such an interesting market?

Pedro Tolipan 23:25

Indeed, and the fact that we are part of such a big organization with multiple industry kind of expertise inside, I think it adds a dimension of complexity into this AI conversation. At the end of last year, we organized a session with all of our leaders from all the companies in the group to talk about AI. And the biggest insight was one, they were all doing things, two, they were not talking to each other, they were all doing things in silence, and the leadership had really very little idea on what is the value that these things were bringing to the organization. So there was, I don't know, probably hundreds of different pilots that were being built. our companies and I must say that probably zero of these ever saw the light of the day. They're all dying a slow death because they couldn't see what the impact was, they couldn't see what exactly the benefit, they were not aligned on what are the problems that AI can solve for them, what are the problems that AI cannot solve for them. That session was a great kind of alignment exercise for, I think, for us, kind of as an inside outside view of how things work with the shape of AI strategy across our group. But also individually for them, they could, OK, we need to be more aligned. We need to talk more. We need to better understand what are the common kind of challenges that our business face that we can probably do something more kind of well coordinated. And I think one thing they, well, it's not at the back of that, but they already thinking, but they now have this chief AI officer across the group, which is really

Pauline Bertry 25:25

Not very nice.

Pedro Tolipan 25:26

the strategy across the group and what AI can do. And again, and this, what I'm going to say now, I borrowed from one of our colleagues, which I love it. And I've been saying, sense and you will recognize that the future of AI will be defined by not by people who understand technology but by people who understand humans, right? People who understand...

Pauline Bertry 25:46

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 25:48

And I love that phrase and it stuck with me and I couldn't agree more and I see now we're still a long kind of time away from being anywhere close to... excellence in this. But I see we have now Pasha Technology who are kind of centralizing and looking at our kind of data structure. We have this chief AI officer who are coordinating efforts. So things are really kind of moving in the right direction as a company goes. And more on our kind of small individual levels here at Futurelab, for a long time people Our team's been playing with Lovable, they've been building things on their own time. One thing that I have identified very early on, right at the beginning when I started, everyone was using chat GPT for their communications, for building presentations. And I saw, guys, this is great, but I don't see your thinking into this, right? I just see an AI kind of response and I want them to really understand how you interact with these tools to bring value to our future lab, but not replacing their thoughts, their initiatives and how they think. So we run a couple of training sessions here for our members on how to prompt and... how to identify when things are starting to hallucinate and put a stop on it, how to ask for help. And we've run a couple of training sessions on vibe coding since, and I feel like our team is now, and this is one of the new things that in parallel, we are building our own platforms here as well. We don't know what to do with If we're gonna just be for us, if we're gonna scale to the group, if we're gonna sell it at some point. But we use an AI, we use an agents to build our own kind of research ops platform. And this

Pauline Bertry 27:59

tell me more, that's super exciting!

Pedro Tolipan 28:01

is amazing if we get it right and we hire this amazing kind of data scientists with future lab. We have an amazing kind of product design which is super clued up on all these AI kind of plugins into Figma and lovable and all that. And we have also, we hired a research lead for the team who is bringing a little bit of the operational side of research. And we already see that no one in our group are doing the way we do it. And this platform will help one serve as a database that everyone could potentially use in the future. but AI can help augment this database, fill up some of the gaps where we cannot go. Obviously, the more research we do, the more people we reach, the richer the platform itself is gonna become. But how do we then help people to do recruiting in the right way for their research? And hopefully this platform will evolve in some amazing tool that will serve all of our group companies in the near future. but it's all based on building these different types of agents that talk to each other and build this kind of 360 view of the population of Azerbaijan. So we'll see.

Pauline Bertry 29:25

But I like this so much because it almost could evolve into an avatar of a persona that could sit into a boardroom with the members of the group and provide them live insights into the conversations that you had in the past from the research.

Pedro Tolipan 29:50

Exactly, And

Pauline Bertry 29:52

I love this.

Pedro Tolipan 29:54

one of the key challenges, again, they're not generalizing, but I do feel our businesses design most of their product in their own image. So they design it for them, for the small elite of, know, Port-Baku, right? So the more

Pauline Bertry 30:12

Yes.

Pedro Tolipan 30:13

affluent type of people, and they completely ignore the bulk of the population not living in the center of Baku, but living in smaller towns and rural areas, farmers, even the large suburbs of Baku. And one thing that surfaced from one of the research that we did where we went to different cities in the country is that, you know, Azerbaijan population has been for a long time. And I say, and some of the words are my own words, living in kind of survival mode, right? Because they've break up with the Soviet Union and it was a bit painful for them. And then they had the conflict with Armenia who on and off kind of lasted quite a long time. And I feel now they can feel a bit of stability in the country. And especially for this younger generation, you know, they're demanding a better life than their parents had. And they are, they've been more exposed to, you know, lots of stuff coming from China, lots of stuff coming from Europe. And they just want them to

Pauline Bertry 31:23

Okay

Pedro Tolipan 31:24

do better for them. And obviously they're not on the stage of speaking out yet, but they have this bubbling kind of emotion inside them that they want better for them. And we are as businesses, we are failing to capitalize on that. And we're still kind of doing things, you know, very rigidly and probably focusing on the more kind of the well of people of the country, ignoring this growing kind of behavior of the population. So there's a huge opportunity for us to have a wider reach as the company is modernizing. know, internet penetration is amazing here in the country in general. There's a lot of positives in the country, really. And I think we need to capitalize on that opportunity to really kind of impact not just the well-off, but the wider population. And this is obviously our companies, our group is heavily based on financial services, which can play a huge role in you know, impacting the lives of people. But if we look at, you know, healthcare, agriculture, lots of other aspects of people's lives where we might not have a direct impact, but we have an indirect impact for some of the companies that we have. And we're just leaving really a lot on the table at the moment, I feel.

Pauline Bertry 32:55

But then it gives me a great opportunity to ask one of my favorite questions generally. I mean, from what you are sharing, I hear that like there is an entire like new generation of people growing who want like a different life, a different lifestyle, a different quality of life, etc. And I know the group is generally investing a lot into the learning and development of their people and the growth kind of areas, et cetera. So what's your view on the future of work in Azerbaijan and in the group? And how does this compare to what you have experienced? while you were in London or in Spain. So what are the main differences that you observed?

Pedro Tolipan 33:51

Yeah, OK. I think overall, and that's not related to Azerbaijan. with all this kind of AI revolution happening. And I do believe we're just at the very beginning of it. So we really do not know what's coming. I feel like, and I'm gonna say that because I get this question a lot and potentially you get like, I'm not gonna lose my job with this. What's the impact on my... And for me, there's a very simple answer, which is it really depends on you, right? First and foremost, if you decide to ignore all the trends and all the things that are happening, then at some point, probably you will become obsolete. But if you are curious, eager to learn, open, and wants to jump into this strain, then you have an amazing opportunity to reinvent yourself and to learn new skills and to see how to do what you do in slightly different ways. And then I think there's just a lot of opportunity will open for you. And obviously I'm not saying that some people will lose their jobs and things will be different, but we will have roles that we don't even know about it today, right? So I think when... I don't know, what's a good example? Like at the beginning of the internet boom, like search engine optimization, there wasn't a thing. So there was no one

Pauline Bertry 35:17

them exist.

Pedro Tolipan 35:18

experts on this. The same way that we don't know that there are roles that will arise that we have no idea that they will be relevant in the future. And I do feel here that at least in our group, everyone... The majority is curious to jump into the train and to learn. And I think this is a reflection of the country, what I saying, that they want to live a better life, they want to learn new skills, and they see the opportunity in front of them. It is up to the leaders of the country to enable this to the wider population. But I think we have a very, as I said in the beginning, I said again, and I say again, they might not have a lot of experience in all these kind of digital roles that we that come from Western Europe has been doing for years. But they are not kind of oblivious of the opportunity and what is happening. They are, and because of the geographic position of the country, they can look equally to both sides to what's happening in

Pauline Bertry 36:23

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 36:24

China and what's happening in the West. So I think they're in a very good position to bring kind of the best of both worlds and to start defining their own future in terms of, you know, how do they want, what are the skills that they need, what is the mentality that they need. And this will inevitably drive the future of work here in the country. At the same time, as you mentioned, the difference is, I would say probably they don't have the experience, they haven't had the opportunity that we London have having for decades and centuries in many ways. But it's coming, they can see it, it's knocking on their door and I think they will be ready to fulfill the roles they're required when the opportunity is given to them.

Pauline Bertry 37:13

And then another question. So we were discussing in the beginning that like you In the context that you operate in, you might not always have people with the biggest experience in a certain field and that you hire a lot for mindset. And I'm wondering, what are the elements that you look for in junior talent when you hire and when you kind of build their capabilities? Assuming that right now, like the lifespan of a technology is often shorter than a lifespan of a project. And like it's, much easier to be, to be like a good individual contributor as a, as a senior individual, because you get much more leverage and much more experience. So you can leverage this kind of judgment that you have from your past experiences, have a little bit of. like AI help and it becomes much easier. But how do you hire junior and like mid-level talent and how do you grow it in the situation where AI is crazy and like changing every day and the technology is changing every day. And at the same time, you need to deliver fast and distinctive things. So how do you hire those people and how do you help them grow?

Pedro Tolipan 38:52

So we've hired, I would say, probably three, four people with some experience. And I think I say, I believe in terms of as product design is concerned, I probably hired the best product designer in the country from a competitor. It's

Pauline Bertry 39:13

Well done!

Pedro Tolipan 39:14

a distinctive talent. And a young. but a great kind of leader in the making, this one thing. And everyone else, if I would say, I hire sponges. And that's it. So I want people who can just learn and open and, you know, I can see the spark in their eyes of, you know, I want to work for Futurelab. I want to be involved in this. I want to be part of this mandate of driving the people-centric future for the country. And even if they are not near the polished article, can see that I can, me and the CEO and these two or three more experienced

Pauline Bertry 39:58

leadership team.

Pedro Tolipan 40:00

can really help shape them. And if they have that, which is, you know, ownership, curiosity, team player, some basic good kind of communication skills, then I think that's it. Let's bring them in.

Pauline Bertry 40:16

Amazing. And then, I mean, now I need to ask what's the shaping process?

Pedro Tolipan 40:21

So the shaping process is a lot of one-to-ones, a lot of stimulations. I mean, it depends on the individual, I connect them with books, I connect them with articles to read, I put them to watch kind of Ted Talks, I even, most of the team, put them to watch Paul Bennett's Ted Talk, you I say, look, watch this. And obviously a few others, but it's, I try to give them opportunities. bring them to meetings with some more senior folks when we do it. So I really try to give them the right exposure, a really safe kind of environment for them to grow where they're not afraid to make a mistake or to say something silly, which I think it's a bit of a stigma here. I feel

Pauline Bertry 41:17

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 41:17

a lot that people don't really speak up. So it's really creating the right environment and giving them the space to shine and to learn. And that's it. It's not rocket science really. think if we, what is the Field of Dreams movie with Kevin Costner? What is it? If you build it, they will come.

Pauline Bertry 41:34

maybe one last question. Kind of wrapping it up as a summary of the conversation. So it feels like you are operating in the environment where there are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of variables, a lot of things are changing. I think that's a little bit how the industry is right now, broadly in the professional services, because of multiple reasons, like the geopolitical situation, the economy, the AI, the generational shifts, et cetera. What is the advice you would give someone who is... like going through the same kind of experience and through the same journey on like how to make it work for them based on what you had to experience as one of the leaders in Futurelab and also during your entire professional journey.

Pedro Tolipan 42:36

Yeah, I'll say that I personally, keep a... I mean, I myself, I keep a very open mind about things, right? So I constantly connect with some old colleagues or some mentors and I ask for advice and I say, look, does this sound right or is it stupid idea? Because I can also, I feel like I can easily get complacent and think that, you know, I've got so much experience, I've done so many things and I know better than they do. I do feel like it's an easy hole to kind of dig for I've just been on this journey for longer and I bring my experience to the rest of the organization, to the team, but I need to also be keeping my sanity and making sure that I'm doing the right things. And I have so many challenges on a personal level with the team, on a human level, and how to... to engage and how to kind of solve some of the problems that arise with the team. I also have my own issues of, you know, coming to a completely different place and living here, which, you I came with my wife and for me it's easy because I'm busy every day. So I get home like just to unwind and sleep and go again next day. So she's here, she's not working. very conscious of taking her to an amazing kind of life she had in Madrid to come here. And she's been a real partner on this journey, but I'm very conscious that for her it's not easy. Not everyone speaks English here, for example.

Pauline Bertry 44:14

now.

Pedro Tolipan 44:14

So the day-to-day interaction is not as easy to kind of make friends. And the expat community here is very small. I think as you know, there's a lot of people from Russia. people from Ukraine, but there's not a lot of Westerns here

Pauline Bertry 44:30

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 44:31

like me. So it is tough. So I rely on my own network for personal and professional level. And kind of the advice that I'll give is, you know, don't be afraid to ask for help because this is the only way you can succeed is making sure that you're constantly asking your network. or advice to make sure that you're not kind of away from the, completely away from the tracks, which is an interesting metaphor because I feel like my role is to get people to go away from

Pauline Bertry 45:05

I it.

Pedro Tolipan 45:05

the track. Completely get out of the track, but at the same time, I need to keep on my own kind of track of things.

Pauline Bertry 45:14

You need to get them off the track but keep them alive.

Pedro Tolipan 45:17

Exactly. Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 45:19

I love this.

Pedro Tolipan 45:20

But it's been a great journey, to be honest. And I don't know. I I came with this, you I'm going to do it for two years and then I'm going to see how it is and make a decision on the next step. And time has flown so quickly. It's already a year and half. And I can see the amazing progress we've done. I can see how this is just kind of scratching the surface on

Pauline Bertry 45:46

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 45:46

what we kind of set up to do. So I see kind of, you know, the wins and I can see the failures. And at the moment I can say I still have some, you know, energy left in me to continue to drive. And I think at the point where even our team, I can see they can run this thing without me, then maybe I'll say, okay, that's... That's good enough.

Pauline Bertry 46:10

Good run.

Pedro Tolipan 46:12

I can do something else. And I feel like, you know, there's probably still some time away, but not massively. Not massively, I think. Yeah, in a few months, probably, I might become obsolete myself.

Pauline Bertry 46:25

Yeah, then you enjoy and take all of the credits for all of the amazing things you guys build together.

Pedro Tolipan 46:35

I have this really on friend level, one colleague from another of our companies who he is, he's got a bit of a technical background. So he's a bit better with some of the tools. And I help him with a human thing, but he's been building these agents to do everything for him, right? He built already three businesses using agents. I'm really? Wow, I need to get my shit together, no? He built this kind of property search business. He built agents that does all his day to day. It looks at his email, respond automatically his email, sort things out, book his travel, arrange his meetings. And I'm like, shit, I'm behind here. I need to, you know, need to up my game. And I said, on the side, he built this business. He's building a second business. What is it again? I forgot now what it is. And, He's got all these different agents he's building to run his life. And I feel like, okay, I don't want to lose control of my life just yet, but I feel like I do need to get a bit, you know, my hands dirty and start experimenting a bit deeper with agentic AI. But

Pauline Bertry 47:44

Yeah,

Pedro Tolipan 47:45

yeah.

Pauline Bertry 47:45

that's, mean, we are experimenting a lot with the agents also, like internally. And

Pedro Tolipan 47:51

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 47:53

it's such a fun game because you kind of, at some point you get so curious about it that you start sometimes building them for the purpose of building. And I think it's a very important kind of level not to go to because as you say, then you'll have you'll have a life where you will serve your agents rather than them serving you. So I think you are on

Pedro Tolipan 48:18

Yeah.

Pauline Bertry 48:18

the right mindset.

Pedro Tolipan 48:20

But that's the thing I do. I do enjoy searching for properties and looking at, you know, I do enjoy searching for my trips, my holidays.

Pauline Bertry 48:27

Yeah

Pedro Tolipan 48:28

I do enjoy doing myself and spending, you know, hours doing it and looking at different things. So I'm, you know, bit skeptical, but one thing that, that I loved what this guy was doing, because it's build this, this property. search website already has got customers and is so he helps kind of know sift through different whatever you want which most

Pauline Bertry 48:52

Yeah.

Pedro Tolipan 48:52

property websites do but one of the things that is doing is it compares the price has been has been advertised for and it tells you if this is aligned with market

Pauline Bertry 49:03

No.

Pedro Tolipan 49:03

up and down tells how much more it is so it does on the pricing level I think it's really clever what he's doing.

Pauline Bertry 49:10

I'm super curious to learn more because you know I love real estate. So maybe I'll ask you for an intro.

Pedro Tolipan 49:17

Exactly, yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah,

Pauline Bertry 49:19

Sounds great! Any closing thoughts?

Pedro Tolipan 49:24

No, I think I also find what you're doing amazing. You're also reinventing yourself. And I think AI is also at the core of how you're trying to reinvent yourself. And I really appreciate that, again, as a design leader, you're also really putting the community at the center of it and learning from other people's expertise and experiences. So I think this is fantastic. And if there was one advice for someone who's doing what I'm doing is that make sure to get connected and learn from what other people are doing, because I'm sure like me, there must be tens and hundreds of people doing something similar and having similar challenges and probably dealing in different ways. So I'm really looking forward to kind of listening to what the other people are saying on your podcast.

Pauline Bertry 50:12

too. But I think I was was posting about it recently, but it's been such a wonderful experience for me personally, because like I get to talk to new people, of course, but I also get to talk to people I know for like ages. And it gives me a completely new, completely different and very inspiring perspective on their journey, because I think, especially when we know people for ages, we often tend to get directly into the conversation, into the topic, into how things are without having this opportunity to sit and have a conversation about the entire journey. And I personally enjoy it so much.

Pedro Tolipan 50:57

Same here.

Pauline Bertry 50:58

Amazing! Thank you so much, Pedro!

Pedro Tolipan 51:00

Thank you Pauline, great to see you. Keep doing it, amazing work. And I hope to see you in person at some point soon.

Pauline Bertry 51:06

Yes, me too. I need to restock my Azerbaijani-ty.

Pedro Tolipan 51:08

I'm Exactly, come, come and you'll not recognize the place you used to live around there. You'll not recognize. There's so many cafes and restaurants and new buildings around it already. So yeah, come visit.

Pauline Bertry 51:21

Alright, bye bye.

Pedro Tolipan 51:23

Ciao!